1PERL5203DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5203DELTA(1)
2
6 perl5203delta - what is new for perl v5.20.3
7
9 This document describes differences between the 5.20.2 release and the
10 5.20.3 release.
11 If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.1, first read
13 perl5202delta, which describes differences between 5.20.1 and 5.20.2.
14
16 There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.2. If any
17 exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report. See
18 "Reporting Bugs" below.
19
21 Updated Modules and Pragmata
22 • Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_05 to 1.20_06.
23 Add -P to the pre-processor command-line on GCC 5. GCC added extra
25 line directives, breaking parsing of error code definitions. [GH
26 #14491] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
27 • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20150214 to
29 5.20150822.
30 Updated to cover the latest releases of Perl.
32 • perl5db.pl has been upgraded from 1.44 to 1.44_01.
34 The debugger would cause an assertion failure. [GH #14605]
36 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
37
39 Changes to Existing Documentation
40 perlfunc
41 • Mention that study() is currently a no-op.
43 perlguts
45 • The OOK example has been updated to account for COW changes and a
47 change in the storage of the offset.
48 perlhacktips
50 • Documentation has been added illustrating the perils of assuming
52 the contents of static memory pointed to by the return values of
53 Perl wrappers for C library functions doesn't change.
54 perlpodspec
56 • The specification of the POD language is changing so that the
58 default encoding of PODs that aren't in UTF-8 (unless otherwise
59 indicated) is CP1252 instead of ISO-8859-1 (Latin1).
60
62 h2ph
63 • h2ph now handles hexadecimal constants in the compiler's predefined
64 macro definitions, as visible in $Config{cppsymbols}. [GH #14491]
65 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
66
68 • t/perf/taint.t has been added to see if optimisations with taint
69 issues are keeping things fast.
70 • t/porting/re_context.t has been added to test that utf8 and its
72 dependencies only use the subset of the "$1..$n" capture vars that
73 Perl_save_re_context() is hard-coded to localize, because that
74 function has no efficient way of determining at runtime what vars
75 to localize.
76
78 Platform-Specific Notes
79 Win32
80 • Previously, when compiling with a 64-bit Visual C++, every Perl
81 XS module (including CPAN ones) and Perl aware C file would
82 unconditionally have around a dozen warnings from hv_func.h.
83 These warnings have been silenced. GCC (all bitness) and
84 32-bit Visual C++ were not affected.
85 • miniperl.exe is now built with -fno-strict-aliasing, allowing
87 64-bit builds to complete with GCC 4.8. [GH #14556]
88 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14556>
89
91 • Repeated global pattern matches in scalar context on large tainted
92 strings were exponentially slow depending on the current match
93 position in the string. [GH #14238]
94 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14238>
95 • The original visible value of $/ is now preserved when it is set to
97 an invalid value. Previously if you set $/ to a reference to an
98 array, for example, perl would produce a runtime error and not set
99 PL_rs, but Perl code that checked $/ would see the array reference.
100 [GH #14245] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14245>
101 • Perl 5.14.0 introduced a bug whereby "eval { LABEL: }" would crash.
103 This has been fixed. [GH #14438]
104 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14438>
105 • Extending an array cloned from a parent thread could result in
107 "Modification of a read-only value attempted" errors when
108 attempting to modify the new elements. [GH #14605]
109 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
110 • Several cases of data used to store environment variable contents
112 in core C code being potentially overwritten before being used have
113 been fixed. [GH #14476]
114 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14476>
115 • UTF-8 variable names used in array indexes, unquoted UTF-8 HERE-
117 document terminators and UTF-8 function names all now work
118 correctly. [GH #14601]
119 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14601>
120 • A subtle bug introduced in Perl 5.20.2 involving UTF-8 in regular
122 expressions and sometimes causing a crash has been fixed. A new
123 test script has been added to test this fix; see under "Testing".
124 [GH #14600] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14600>
125 • Some patterns starting with "/.*..../" matched against long strings
127 have been slow since Perl 5.8, and some of the form "/.*..../i"
128 have been slow since Perl 5.18. They are now all fast again. [GH
129 #14475] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14475>
130 • Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack. This
132 prevents infinite recursion when the now fatal error also causes
133 rewinding of the stack. [GH #14319]
134 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14319>
135 • setpgrp($nonzero) (with one argument) was accidentally changed in
137 Perl 5.16 to mean setpgrp(0). This has been fixed.
138 • A crash with "%::=(); J->${\"::"}" has been fixed. [GH #14790]
140 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14790>
141 • Regular expression possessive quantifier Perl 5.20 regression now
143 fixed. "qr/"PAT"{"min,max"}+""/" is supposed to behave identically
144 to "qr/(?>"PAT"{"min,max"})/". Since Perl 5.20, this didn't work
145 if min and max were equal. [GH #14857]
146 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14857>
147 • Code like "/$a[/" used to read the next line of input and treat it
149 as though it came immediately after the opening bracket. Some
150 invalid code consequently would parse and run, but some code caused
151 crashes, so this is now disallowed. [GH #14462]
152 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14462>
153
155 Perl 5.20.3 represents approximately 7 months of development since Perl
156 5.20.2 and contains approximately 3,200 lines of changes across 99
157 files from 26 authors.
158 Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
160 were approximately 1,500 lines of changes to 43 .pm, .t, .c and .h
161 files.
162 Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
164 community of users and developers. The following people are known to
165 have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.20.3:
166 Alex Vandiver, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs'
168 Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Daniel Dragan,
169 David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan,
170 James McCoy, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx,
171 Lajos Veres, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Petr Písař, Randy Stauner,
172 Ricardo Signes, Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Yves Orton.
173 The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
175 generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
176 include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
177 reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
178 Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
180 modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
181 community for helping Perl to flourish.
182 For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
184 please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
185
187 If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
188 recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
189 database at https://rt.perl.org/ . There may also be information at
190 http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
191 If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
193 program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a
194 tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output
195 of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
196 the Perl porting team.
197 If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
199 inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
200 send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
201 subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
202 committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
203 figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
204 mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
205 supported. Please only use this address for security issues in the
206 Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
207
209 The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
210 on what changed.
211 The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
213 The README file for general stuff.
215 The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
217perl v5.38.2 2023-11-30 PERL5203DELTA(1)